‘I leave everything to you’: An autotheoretical, practice-based exploration of the personal, political and social stakes of engaging with national identity and collective memory.

Abstract

Through practice-based research, I theorise the personal, political and social stakes of engaging with national identity, collective memory and mutual forgetting as imagined, relational inheritances. These stakes are explored through selected narratives associated with the Anzac legend, including the memoir of an Anzac veteran and a bridge destroyed during the WW1 Sinai and Palestine Campaign. The Anzac legend is based in military lore and is the locus of a trans-Tasman collective memory of WW1 events; it is a homogenising, colonial origin story of nationhood that often erases and co-opts other, non-dominant narratives.
Engaging with the nuances of the Anzac legend is important because it is currently a framework through which national identity is understood in seemingly unquestionable ways.

My doctoral research contributes new knowledge to the ethical concerns and limits of plural-authorship within the field of autotheory; art practice as a primary site for embodied theorising; practice-based methods of engagement with Anzac narratives; the ethics of, and policy concerning, authorship and ownership of NFTs.

I focus my research through the lens of my art practice, proposing alternative forms of knowledge production through autotheoretical modes of embodied theory, sculpture, film and discursive practices. I frame ‘thinking-with’ as an autotheoretical methodology. Forms of thinking-with include endurance sculpture, swimming, selfrecording, reflective filmmaking, bronze casting, fibre spinning, NFTs, collaborative research and podcasting.

Date of Award	25 Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Christine Borland (Supervisor) & Katherine Baxter (Supervisor)